


these marks are scars

by fabeld



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Slash, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 19:50:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4758827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabeld/pseuds/fabeld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles's soulmate isn't who his family expected, but he's better than not having one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these marks are scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [endlesshorizons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesshorizons/gifts).
  * Inspired by [don't leave me here alone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4197717) by [endlesshorizons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesshorizons/pseuds/endlesshorizons). 
  * In response to a prompt by [endlesshorizons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesshorizons/pseuds/endlesshorizons) in the [xmen_remix_madness2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/xmen_remix_madness2015) collection. 



“I don’t think I have one,” Raven says, blue legs kicked out in front of her. Her small toes curl forward, sunlight catching on transparent nails, a window into deeper blue skin.

She ignores him when Charles warns of the rising consciousness buzzing in the back of his head. The color of bruises twisted on a pale arm; the taste of blood in his mouth. Cain. Their stepbrother’s pulled himself out of bed, heavy feet slapping on wood floors, fat fingers grazing the knob of Charles’s bedroom door. They have ten minutes before Cain’s rushing down the stairs and peering out the kitchen window, angry eyes settling on the curve of their shoulders and the sweep of Raven’s red hair, lounging down by the pond.

“Let him see,” Raven says, tilting her chin towards the sky. “You’ll just have to wipe his memory.”

Charles’s fingers tangle in small mounds of grass, nails scratching against the dirt. This familiar discussion haunts them like his father’s presence looming over the manor, weaved into the fabric of their relationship. It took years to train his mother to see Raven as her daughter — adopted, her husband’s idea, not her own. Charles cannot fathom the mental labor required to pinch a memory between two fingers and carefully tear at it’s serrated edges, leaving thoughts and emotions and dialogue intact. But he knows, in the pit of his stomach, if he must do it for anyone, it will be for Raven.

And yet, he laces his words with emotion. Projecting, pleading. “I’d rather not.”

Her shoulders soften. Her mouth tenses up. “Stop it,” she says, whipping her head in his direction. “You know I — I hate it when you —”

“You won’t listen to me unless I —”

“That’s not true,” Raven says, blue skin rippling to pale pink, blonde hair waving down her back. “I listen to you all the time.”

 _No_ , Charles thinks, _you don’t_. He keeps the words locked in the back of his mind, nails digging deeper into the dirt. In two weeks he’ll be off to boarding school. He refuses to spend his remaining time sniping at Raven.

“Maybe he’s not born yet,” he says, circling back to Raven’s original point.

With knitted brows she stares at the side of his face. Charles ignores the tendrils of his telepathy, forming fingers and nails, desperate to pick at Raven’s brain. She’s itching for an argument, he can almost taste it in the back of his throat, her raw desire to draw this out. Charles keeps his gaze fixed on the water before them, fireflies humming about bright yellow and pink flowers, drops of sunlight splashing across diminutive waves.

“Maybe,” Raven says, tipping her head back towards the sky. “Or maybe I’m defected.”

Her words carve up his spine like a knife, setting tremors to the tips of his fingers. Defected. A possibility no one wishes to take into consideration when their child slides out naked and unscarred, without a hint of raised skin across their chest. Charles’s placeholder was a violent slash of white, long enough to reach up to his neck. His fingers trailed across it, mapping the rough edges with the ridges of his fingerprints. Slowly, the scar shaped into a stamp of letters, harsh like the pair of consonants scraping the inside of his mother’s throat.

Charles remembers the harsh set of her mouth, the smell of her perfume, soft poison in his nostrils as she shook her head and said, “A boy. Our only son and he belongs to a boy.” She licked her thumb, spread spit across his skin as if it were a stain to be removed.

“It doesn’t matter,” his father said. “My cousin’s soulmate is a man.”

His mother scowled, another lick of her thumb, swiping until a wash of red covered Charles’s neck and chest. “If it matters to me,” she said, words cutting against her teeth, “it will matter to everyone else.”

She tolerates his scar only in the absence of Raven’s. Whether blue or pink there’s no Name to be found on her long stretch of skin. Charles knows she spends hours in the mirror, shifting patches of skin to resemble a Name but nothing ever sticks. She tries on the bodies of their neighbors, her teachers, the maids and Charles, gazing wondrously at the various shades of raised skin, desperate for one of her own.

“You’re not defected,” Charles says.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But if you are that doesn’t — There’s nothing wrong with you.”

A mountain of emotion swells in the forefront of Raven’s mind. Charles catches it without warning, the resentment of her mutation, making her undesirable even to fate. Violent images, like teeth cutting into skin, raise up: Raven setting a knife to the soles of her feet, slicing them open and peeling back her skin, revealing miles of pale white Names underneath.

Charles bites his tongue, swallows the urge to reassure her, though it rises up like vomit. Instead he says, “Cain’s coming.”

Raven pushes herself up, floral dress brushing across the tops of her knees, bare feet sinking into the earth. “Come on,” she says, holding out her hand, “let’s go swimming.” The gruesome image fades in the light of Raven’s smile, soft and growing.

Charles squints to keep out the sun. “In a minute.”

Raven shrugs and skips towards the pond. Browned bottoms of the feet, toes dipping into the water.

He has two minutes before Cain’s fist thumps against the back of his head, gruff laughter spinning from his stepbrother’s mouth.

Charles pushes his fingers beneath his collar, the pad of them brushing over raised letters. He knows their shape, can predict the flaking skin covering sharp corners, the smooth patch along the curves, the brevity in which his Name appears.

Erik.


End file.
